Painting the Centurion was a really interesting, but quite exhausting project. I instantly fell in love with the bust when I saw Sergey´s version for the first time on Putty&Paint. It had so much power and you could almost hear the noise of battle.

As I´m very interested in Roman military history, I wanted to stick as
much as possible to the archaeological proven facts regarding equipment and
color (even if the sculpt puts some barriers here). To make things clear: I enjoy every nice paintjob I see, regardless of its "historical correctness". Painting a bust/miniature is a matter of artistic freedom and it should always stay this way.

Imagine yourself somewhere in Western Parthia (today: Syria, Iraq). Heat and dust are almost unbearable. You are in the middle of a battle, thirsty after a long march and fighting for your life. Your only chance to survive this, is by keeping your scutum up and your gladius ready for the next killing blow...

Thanks a lot to my friends, Christian Koepfer for his academic
advice regarding the Roman Army and to Roman for kicking my ass where it was necessary ;)

Roman Centurion, Roman-Parthian War, 61 AD

You can find more photos in my Putty&Paint Gallery.Comments and critics are always welcome :)Cheers,Peter

You all might have seen the big MV Studio Table
we build last year.
By now it is already a great place were we enjoy working.

During the past months a lot of people asked us why the hell we have such a plastic cone in the center of our table on a lot of photos. What's up with this? Plastic cone, not the miniatures ...

Allright, now we finally can lay open that magical secret about the plastic cone: Already during our plans for the table we decided that it would be so cool to have a garbage in the middle of the table and as we all enjoy basketball and need training in aiming we decided to build just that.

The good thing about our table is that you can remove the middle section of wood pretty easily. It's just a wooden board. We took it out and cut a hole in the right radius for the cone.

The famous Raffa photo that was hunting everyone who is interested in MV's year of the painter 2 in their dreams:

Well, as the board was removed we again got reminded that our plan was also to work on a proper cable situation under the table. Without the board we had a lot of light down there to BE reminded :D - at least we clean the studio once a week.

Allright, next step was placing the cone in the hole. See if it fits and all measures upfront were done right.

After the cone's end was cut off we took a pipe that we bought for this task and ...

... glued it in place with hot glue.
All ready now to bring it back to the table.

Placed it looked so glowing from the inside because all of our daylight lamps made the plastic cone so shiny:

After this we placed a big garbage can in the right position. Now the plan was ready to be put to a test. If we now throw garbage to the our cone it should run down to the garbage can. Great idea, isn't it? Well, we failed on the first test, definatly. Our studio's hot glue gun went dead and we realized that the garbage we created is not prepared for too big sized garbage:
Well, but it is done now and you can believe us it is fun if five to six painters sit around the table and start throwing their garbage in the middle of the table. Feels like basketball but different and very often we have to take care of the surface as not everybody of us is a Michael Jordan when it comes to garbage throwing.

We hope you enjoyed this garbage article.
Now we are over with it and will never see it again during MV's Tutorial voting.
I think this is the best news of all :D

by Massive Voodoo

Hello Jungle,
it's review time.

Some weeks ago the MV studio welcomed Waldemar from Germany as a guest for private coaching.
Waldemar took lessons from Roman in a pretty cool two day private coaching.

Waldemar is a MV Workshop veteran who already took Jar's Beginner's Class and Jar's Basing Class during the last couple of years. Roman was really happy to see him again for a well prepared training session for Waldemar on the following subjects:

Roman wants to thank Waldemar for his trust in his teaching skills, the will to learn on and on and the really cool time we had together during the coaching. From now on Waldemar takes over with his impressions on the coaching.

If you consider doing your own private coaching with MV you can find all necessary information and reviews here. Please be aware that right now we are already fully booked until July 2016.

My expectations for the private coaching were to get better generally. I wanted to learn, how I can better plan the whole painting process and how the miniature should look like, to create a certain atmosphere and not just copies of already existing characters. I always missed this “BAM” effect. From my point of view something was always missing, but I never knew what.

You can read the precise objectives for the personal class above. These goals
I have developed together with Roman before the workshop started.1st day After the arrival, a friendly welcome from Roman and a short small talk, I prepared my painting place (light, colors, airbrush, etc.).
Then Roman looked at my miniatures to understand how far I was and where I have weaknesses. We talked about atmosphere and other topics, and Roman taught me what I have to pay attention to.

After the detailed discussion I had to mix different colors from the basic ones to understand color theory, which helped me a lot. After that, we applied the local color and then we started already with the skin. I sprayed the skin color with the Airbrush. After further work on the skin with the brush, where I learned so many details, we continued with the leather and fabric parts. We worked out the structure of a those materials. The time flew and around 11pm we completed a successful painting day.

Impressions from day 1. Roman painted "Waldemar, the Gaul Chieftain" and Waldemar painted the Roman soldier who angered the Chieftain by retrieving back the eagle (our Fantasy stories went wild on these two).

2nd dayOn the 2nd day we started at 10am. Roman was very kindly and painted my base in black already when I arrived. We continued to work on the skin, put some highlights on the leather and worked out some more details.
Then we started with the painting of the metal. After some explanations from Roman, I painted the chest protector and the helmet of the legionary. We have worked on the metal structure, light, and shadows. Then we set a few highlights here and there on the different materials. Finally, we sprayed a thin glaze with the airbrush on the miniature.

After painting, we discussed some open questions that I had. Roman showed me how to take good pictures and we brought the painting workshop to a close.

Impressions on day 2. Mainly detail work and athmospheric tweaking here and there.

Roman even planned to do a step by step guide on how to freehand such large shield, but he failed in taking photos :D

Summarized I can say that my expectations were exceeded and the private coaching has brought a lot to me, because it was adapted to my personal skills and needs. I can recommend this private coaching with Roman to anybody who wants to improve his painting skills, independent from the painting level.
Thanks again for the great experience and good luck!

Waldemar

Final photos on the second evening of the coaching:

Waldemar finished of the piece during the last weeks and sent Roman final photos:

Today's Tutorial Voting will be different!Roman is about to take one week off for vacation after his upcoming weekend painting class and today he decided that this week it is time for the wonderful "Garbage-Article", no matter what you say.

In fact today you can not decide which article you will read on Thursday.
It will be this one, no matter what:

#01Equipment - best workspace garbage ever!
You all might have seen the big MV Studio Table
we build last year. Now it is time to place the best workspace garbage
ever to it. Fun for all painters who sit around the table. You want to
know more? Then vote for it!

Next week Raffa will take over the Tutorial Voting while Roman is on vacation.
Stay tuned and read about "Garbage" this Thursday!

by Massive Voodoo

Ladies and gentlemen,

just one more month and the show "Duke of Bavaria" will take place in Ingolstadt. The jungle is very active at the moment and if you visit the show, you will surely meet some of the monkeys and see their painted/sculpted stuff.

Today, Peterwill allow us a quick glance at his table and the projects he is working on:

------------------------------

As some of you might know, I´m not the most active painter. I have a very ambivalent attitude towards my hobby. Sometimes I´m very active and enjoy painting so much, but then there are these other times, when I would like to throw everything against the wall. I learnt over the last years that these ups and downs are often connected to my actual situation in life (work, people, family) and that I should leave the brush alone if there is no joy in wielding it. But, I´m working hard to learn riding these waves of emotions and get a more "stable" course :)

Duke of Bavaria is a show, which I enjoy every year. It´s the time to meet friends from all over the world and just hang out with them. So, the months before the event are my most active times in painting.

My first attempts were not very good, as the bust is really big and there are also some quality issues regarding the sculpting. So, motivation was rather low, but about two months ago, I got a lot of inspiration from my good friend Christian, who is a specialist for the Roman Army. He told me so much about the Roman Army and their equipment and also helped me with the color choice. So, I repainted a lot and this is the actual result - WIP:

I see him somewhere in Parthia (today Syria/Iraq/Iran), fighting for his life under the middle eastern sun. As I learnt a lot about atmosphere in the last weeks (see below), there is still a lot to do until he is finished. But I think I´m on the right way :)

I thought about doing a longer article regarding the equipment and the colors, so if you are interested in this topic, let me know in the comments.

The second project, I´m working on was more of a lucky chance then planning. About a month ago, I was in Augburg for a nice painting evening. I wanted to work on my Centurion, but somehow had a bad start. There was something missing, but I could not identify what it was. Roman wanted to help me, as he could see what was missing: life and atmosphere. So, with my agreement, he started painting on the bust and explained what he was doing... but my mind broke... I could not understand what he was doing, I had some kind of a really, really bad blockade.

In order to get things right back on track again, Roman decided to do a spontaneous private coaching with me. He had and Raffa had promised me a coaching as a birthday present last year, but there was never the right time, except for this evening and Roman started with his private coaching with me right away to push me further in my personal painting development.

Roman had finished his version of Abalam just the evening before and had another cast available. So, things were settled: I would paint this awesome bust and Roman would give me an intense teaching in atmosphere over the next weeks. To be honest, it´s not an easy job for him... we know each other for so long and are close friends, but in matters of painting we somehow speak total different languages (like lions in Africa and eagles from an alien planet :-P).

This is the actual result, after I had done my "homework" last Friday - still WIP and I am not allowed to paint on without Roman's guidance in the next teaching session:

As you can see, I placed Abalam in the morning light, which is coming from the left. The bust is not finished yet, but the next teaching lesson will be in two weeks and I´m eager to learn more :)

I can only recommend to do a coaching with Roman or Raffa. Even as I´m a big fan of classes and the good atmosphere there, you learn so much more, if there is somebody right next to you.

So much from my table. Now, it´s time to get back to the brush and keep going!

by Massive Voodoo

Aloa Jungle,

Roman is painting up stuff and really enjoying his personal studies on different topics of miniature painting lately. Once again he decided to paint up some 1:72 stuff as it is always a great practice to learn to paint small and tiny stuff, move the brush in small areas and so on.

He recently bought this 1:72 Pak (Anti-Tank-Gun) from Zvezda.
The quality of the piece is just amazing for this scale and it was rather cheap. His paintjob is far from a historical traditional paintjob, but that is what he aimed for. Nonetheless he plans to add it to his Historical Master display at the Duke of Bavaria - yeah why not?

It is the usual kit, scratchbuild base and Roman added a german officer from another Zvezda set to the crew of the gun (standing guy with googles):

The piece is really small, here you can see a photo of it on Roman's desk beside a pencil:

Pure athmospheric painting and study of colors by Roman here. Roman enjoyed to paint the small puddles the most, reflecting the burning sky. He hopes you like the piece too?

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Welcome to the Jungle...

... MASSIVE VOODOO’s jungle, where some apes share their thoughts and ideas around their beloved passion, the hobby of miniature painting and sculpting.

Feel welcome to come and check the jungle for tons of articles, interesting tutorials, creative competitions and the simple joy of happy painting hidden behind every tree. We hope that everyone finds their own banana in here, if not do not hesitate to ask the apes. We are more than happy for you to post in the comments section to help turn this jungle into the lush, overgrown painting corner we hope it will become.